Evie and Maryam's Family Tree

There is a lot to like about this debut novel. Janeen Hayat skillfully moves between two stories. A modern tale about the developing friendship of Maryam and Evie, who are in the same class at school, and another about the friendship of their great grandmothers Kathy and Safia, across lines of race and religion in 1930s India. Both stories are well observed and, while some of the harsher aspects of life under the Raj are softened to allow the earlier friendship enough space to grow, Hayat introduces both Safia’s involvement in the independence movement and the later tragedy of partition with explanations well within the understanding of her readers. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the tale comes in modern Evie’s heart searching about her classmates’ treatment of Maryam, as her uneasiness grows to the point where she speaks out against her former friends. In the perceptive contemporary story, Evie and Maryam are brought together by their separate discoveries of the coded letters which passed between their great grandmothers after Kathy left India for Britain. The gradual solving of this mystery will no doubt have some fascination for young readers. But perhaps it is stretching historical credulity too far to claim that the older Kathy might reveal to Safia (and only Safia) that she is working as a codebreaker at Bletchley Park and that these letters, in a code elementary enough to be cracked by schoolchildren, would pass unnoticed by the wartime censor.